Percival Everett
Adult
A reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn told from the enslaved Jim’s point of view. When Jim overhears that he is about to be sold away from his wife and daughter, he runs — and the raft journey down the Mississippi becomes his story of language, literacy, and who gets to be the narrator.
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Jim is the narrator now, not the sidekick. Everett keeps the raft and the danger, and gives the enslaved man literacy, irony, and a mind the original story never granted him.
Adult. Readers who know Huck Finn, and readers who were never given Jim as a person. Racial violence is on the page.
Who gets to tell this story, and what changes when that answer flips?
Set a page of Twain’s Jim beside a page of Everett’s James. Name what the dialect was doing.
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